From ‘Out Of The Mountains‘ (David Kilcullen, 2013) pp261-4
The war in Afghanistan is not yet over, and even when Western troops leave, it won’t truly end: we will need to remain engaged, not least because we have friends there who have committed to us, and vice versa. But as we turn our attention back to the world after Afghanistan and Iraq, and as the dust of the last decade settles, we need to remember what we were doing before 9/11. At that time, a whole community of people was thinking hard and writing extensively about the civil and military problems of conflict in urbanized, complex, heavily populated littorals. The military dropped out of this conversation sometime after 2003, when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq really kicked off. For a decade since then, the discussion has gone on without much input from those who have been fighting the war. Companies like IBM, Google and McKinsey, several universities, and a number of think tanks have thought through most of the problems of urban growth, littoralization, and connectivity but often without enough well-informed thought on the implications for conflict, or a systems perspective on how that conflict will affect, and in turn be affected by, the emerging environment of coastal megacities.
It’s time for the generation who fought the war to take what they learned in the hills and valleys of a landlocked conflict, and apply it to a challenging new environment; it’s time to think about the implications of the coming age of urban, networked, guerrilla war in the mega-slums and megacities of a coastal planet. It’s time to drag ourselves — body and mind — out of the mountains.
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Appendix
I’ve SAVED MUCH OF the most specific and technical discussion about future war for this appendix, which talks about how military organisations might find themselves getting sucked into conflict in urban, networked littoral areas, what things may be like when they do, and how they’ll need to organize, equip, and operate so as to prevail there. These ideas aren’t just relevant to military leaders and planners, though — as previous chapters have shown, this sort of thing is unfortunately going to be everyone’s business, in one way or another.
As we think about war in the urban, networked littoral, it’s essential to first recognize the rather obvious point that many future problems will have no purely military solutions. Rapid unplanned urbanization, lack of governance capacity, limited economic opportunity, youth unemployment, or shortages of energy, water, and sanitation — all of which, as we’ve seen, can be city-killers— can’t be fixed simply by the judicious application of some magic formula of kinetic force. Armies, in particular, have a tendency to destroy cities, as we saw in Chapter 2, and bringing large numbers of troops or police into places like Tivoli Gardens or La Rocinha may just give people more opportunities to be shaken down and intimidated. Many threats in future cities will be what have been called “threats without enemies” — there’ll be nobody to fight, nothing to kill.
But that doesn’t mean armed forces (and, by extension, armed law enforcement, including constabulary, gendarmerie, border security, and coast guard organizations) don’t have a critical role. On the contrary: as our discussion of competitive control theory showed in Chapter 3, the ability to prevail at the coercive end of the spectrum is the foundation for everything else, since without that ability, administrative and persuasive efforts (however excellent) are moot. To paraphrase the Vietnam War adviser John Paul Vann, security might only be 10 percent of the problem, or it might be 90 percent, but whichever it is, it’s the first 10 percent, or the first 90 percent. If you fail to create a basic minimum level of security and predictability for ordinary people on the street, it doesn’t matter what else you try to do, because none of it is ever likely to happen.! Likewise, unless you can control surface problems of violent conflict, it’s impossible (or at least dramatically more difficult) to get to the underlying issues that need to be addressed in order to build a city’s resilience.
And because, as we’ve seen, cities disaggregate combat — reducing even large battles to a series of small, fleeting, short-range engagements dominating the coercive end of the spectrum implies the ability to prevail in close combat. (Close combat — sometimes called close-quarter battle — can occur on land, at sea, or in the air, and involves two-way fights that happen well within maximum visual or sensor distance. If you can shoot farther than you can see, and someone’s shooting back, you’re in a close-combat situation.) Another way of putting it is that to do anything in a contested, urbanized environment, you must first establish persistent presence, and to establish that presence you have to prevail (or deter, by proving you can prevail) in a fight. That fight, by definition, will be a close fight because of the way cities create close-range, distributed, fleeting engagements. Before we break this idea down in more detail, it’s worth explaining how the military might — despite everyone’s best intentions — be dragged into this kind of combat.
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